Date: 7 Aug 2003 19:17:19 GMT From: davehinznopsamcop.net Subject: Re: OT: Cell phones and driving
Someone who looks an awful lot like Everett M. Greene <mojavegnopsamsp.com> wrote: > davehinznopsamcop.net writes: >> >> So, I need to either sell my house, or get a different job it seems. >> When I'm on call (I'm in the IT field), I have to respond to an incident >> within 5 minutes, to acknowledge the incident and report that I'm working >> on it. > My first reaction to reading the above was that five minute response > time is ludicrous. OK, I have an hour drive time. Even if I had a 55-minute response time limit, it's still less time than my drive takes. Same question/problem/ situation, isn't it? I suppose if it was 30 minutes, I could turn around to answer the page, but that's not all that realistic, is it. > There's very little in this world except medical > emergencies and ballistic missile defense where a few minutes one way > or another will be of any significance. IT is certainly NOT one of > the fields where realtime response is critical. It is when the people who pay my salary lose many dollars per second that the site is down. If I don't respond, the next person on the list gets called 5 minutes later, and so on. If each of us had 30 minutes to not respond, it could be many, many lost seconds before someone started working on the problem. The point, however, illustrates that there may be real needs to be reachable. The mere act of being on a cellphone isn't the problem, it's the act of being on a cellphone and being reckless that is. This is the whole eternal "bad thing" vs. "bad person" argument - the appropriate, vs. the inappropriate, use of tools. > My second thought was if you respond, what good does it do? It > would not be possible to take notes or do much of anything more than > maybe record a message. If you're going to record a message, you > might as well just use voicemail and not even answer the calls. "I acknowlege the page and will have an update in (number) of minutes". The nature of these calls will be something like "The ordersystem is not responding", or "Transactions to/from (institution) are not coming through". Is this about our Service Level Agreement, or about bad driving? > A later response by Mr. Hinz indicates that the five-minute thing > determines whether the next person on the list of trouble-shooters > gets called. The solution is simple: Let them call someone else > while you're driving. Then we effectively have two people on call at the same time, who then have to stagger their drive times so that both are not driving at the same time. Sorry, but that's not a change I'm willing to make, to avoid a once a month phone call to me while I'm driving, which will take one percent of that drivetime to deal with. Dave Hinz
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